Rebecca's Promise

by Frances R. Sterrett

Granny had no opportunity to know what would happen if old Peter Simmons was late for his golden wedding for he came striding in long before the clock struck twelve on the twenty-second of July. Young Mrs. Simmons with Mrs. Hiram Bingham and Mrs. Joshua Cabot were assisting the maids in the pleasant task of arranging the quantities of yellow and white flowers which came pouring in.

Rebecca Mary in a pretty pink gingham, lent a hand wherever she could, but she really wasn't of very much help for her thoughts would stray to Richard and to Count Ernach de Befort. She couldn't keep them on the yellow and white flowers, and every time her thoughts strayed the color in her cheeks grew pinker than the color in her frock. She was, oh, so ashamed and mortified when she remembered that she had locked Count Ernach de Befort in Major Martingale's office and she told herself that she hated Richard Cabot when she remembered that he had found her clinging to the door. She should have been grateful to Richard, but she insisted that she wasn't, not a bit. Richard had diagnosed her case as that of a goose, a dear little goose, but she did not agree with him at all. She told herself that she had been a fool, a perfectly idiotic fool. And she told herself, also, that she hoped she would never see either Richard or Frederick Befort again for she wanted to forget what a perfectly idiotic fool she had been. She wanted to see young Peter and Wallie and Ben. The line of her lips softened when she thought of them. What fun they had had at Riverside! She wondered if they had thought of her at all or if they had been too busy with the great experiment to think of any girl. With her thoughts roving from Waloo to Riverside it was no wonder that Rebecca Mary was not of more assistance and that she put the white flowers where Judy Bingham had planned to place the yellow flowers.

When old Peter Simmons came striding in like a conqueror, Granny was just coming down the stairs, and she looked more like an old saint in her white linen house gown than she did like a woman who had ever run away from her husband's question.

"HELLO, KITTY!"

"Where's Mrs. Simmons? Where's my bride?" demanded old Peter Simmons almost before he crossed the threshold, and then he saw her on the stairs. "Hello, Kitty!" He met her at the foot of the stairs with outstretched hands. "You don't look a day older than you did fifty years ago. And you don't act half as old. Aren't you ashamed of the way you've been running about the country?" He gave her a little shake before he kissed her.

"You need stronger glasses, Peter, dear, if you think I don't look older than I did when we were married. Goodness knows I don't feel as old! I should say I didn't! Then I was eighteen on the outside and felt at least seventy on the inside, and now I'm sixty-eight on the outside, and I don't feel more than eighteen on the inside. But I look sixty-eight. Yes, Peter, I do, and you look seventy-one. Perhaps a person can cheat old Time on the inside, but he can't do it on the outside. There are tattle tales here—and here." And her finger touched the wrinkles which separated old Peter Simmons' two grizzled eyebrows and the lines which ran from the corners of his nose to the corners of his mouth. "You didn't have those when you married me, Peter Simmons!"

Old Peter Simmons laughed as if it were a huge joke to have wrinkles on his golden wedding day. "I've a lot now that I didn't have when I married you, old lady. Well, we've had fifty pretty fair years together, haven't we?" He looked down at her fondly. "Want fifty more?"

Granny never hesitated the fraction of a second. "Mercy, no!" she declared quickly. "That would be far too much of a good thing, a regular gilding of a beautiful lily. Just a few more years, Peter, dear, and we'll be through. We've earned our rest."